Jazz Giant Ornette Coleman Dies at 85 Jazz Giant Ornette Coleman Dies at 85 By Zach Schonfeld On 6/11/15 at 11:55 AM Saxophonist Ornette Coleman performs during the 40th Montreux Jazz Festival in Montreux, Switzerland, on July 2, 2006. Dominic Favre/Reuters Ornette Coleman, the saxophonist and jazz great widely credited with both spurring and naming the free jazz movement in the 1960s, died on Thursday, a family representative confirmed. Coleman, 85, died from a cardiac arrest. Born and raised in Texas, Coleman came to prominence during the bebop era and early in his career displayed an innovative musical technique that dispensed with conventional harmonic approaches. His 1959 album The Shape of Jazz to Come revolutionized the genre and became a landmark release in avant-garde jazz and what would soon be termed free jazz.

Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week Coleman released Change of the Century and This Is Our Music in the early 1960s and became a prominent if polarizing figure in the New York City jazz world, performing at such venues as the Five Spot. He won over musicians ranging from Lou Reed and John Zorn to the hardcore punk band Refused, which honored Coleman by titling an album The Shape of Punk to Come. Related Stories John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme' Is Still a Masterpiece After 50 Years Coleman continued performing well into his 70s and 80s and won a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2007. "He was seen as a native avant-gardist," The New York Times writes, "and symbolized the American independent will as effectively as any artist of the last century." The Shape of Jazz to Come: Remembering Ornette Coleman Jun. 12, 2015 · Features – R.I.P.

The Shape of Jazz to Come: Remembering Ornette Coleman RSS By Matt Collar There were their strange songs, any one of which could have made a lesser band's career and each of which had the knack of standing the accepted doctrines on their head.—The Nation of Ulysses "The Sound of Jazz to Come" Plays Pretty for Baby (1992). When I read that Ornette Coleman had died yesterday, I remembered sitting in my dorm room in 1993, listening to Coleman's 1958 album, Something Else!!! The Music of Ornette Coleman . Digging on the frenetic, swinging "When Will the Blues Leave," I turned to my saxophonist roommate and asked, "Man, why doesn't anybody talk about Ornette anymore? I mean, he's still alive. Where's his masterclass?" My roommate shrugged, "Nobody cares. He's a free jazz guy. They don't think he's important to the tradition." As a jazz student, I was well aware of Coleman's innovative contributions to the development of free jazz and modern creative improvisation. Today, in light of his death, it almost goes without saying how important he was to jazz and to music in general.

But it wasn't always so. In the late '80s and early '90s, most people I knew rarely talked about Coleman with any regularity, let alone reverence. It wasn't that my classmates or professors disliked his music—some probably loved him. But Coleman, with his harmolodics and his squelchy, animalistic intonations, was a fringe element, a dicey associate of the tradition we were studying, whose relevance we took completely for granted. For some reason, Downbeat critic Leonard Feather’s flippant description of Coleman’s style as “anti-jazz” had stuck. This was all decades before he won the Pulitzer for Jazz with 2006's Sound Grammar or was awarded a Grammy for lifetime achievement in 2007. While Coleman's music was supposed to be free jazz (a term he was never fully comfortable with), I loved how you could hear form and melody and call-and-response group interplay on his early albums. Also, being a trumpet player, I was immensely drawn to Coleman because he worked with sideman Don Cherry . They were like a gorgeously skewed, abstract version of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie .

Their almost-psychic connection famously found them beginning songs together without even counting off. They’d just stare at each other in silence before leading off in unison. I had attempted to play jazz since junior high, but I was also a kid of the '80s, my head full of skateboards and Star Wars and punk rock. Growing up in Michigan, I was aware of The Stooges , and the MC5 —proto-punk bands who, via their own pure, unadulterated, brazen musical inspiration, often tried to capture the energy, declamatory sound and frenetic spirit of jazz for their own boundary pushing purposes. Steve Mackay's unhinged sax on The Stooges' Funhouse still makes me sweat with joy. And at the same time that I was discovering bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat , I was also crate digging for jazz cassettes, sometimes buying them based on the covers alone. One album in particular stuck out at me. It featured four of the coolest looking motherfuckers I’d ever seen, each one donning a suit and a cool, disaffected expression, like off-duty Secret Service agents who might arrest me if they actually gave a shit.

This was how a jazz band would look if David Lynch was their manager. It was the most badass thing I'd ever seen. I bought the cassette, went straight home, and shoved it into my tape deck. Sitting on my bedroom floor, I was completely unprepared for the work of genius I was about to hear. Without warning, the whole band started playing at once, a serpentine, kinetic melody. It sounded like Charlie Parker, but weirder, like the moaning angry ghost of bluesman with tourettes. Bebop ectoplasm. A song summoned forth from the netherworld of jazz's forgotten past, played like a sufi chant or a sped up field holler, or like Henry Rollins in front of Black Flag . Kick Out the Jams, Mutherfucker, this was punk rock. Technically speaking, it wasn't punk rock. What it was, was Ornette Coleman's 1961 landmark This Is Our Music . The song was "Blues Connotation,” and the band, along with Coleman on a white plastic saxophone and Cherry on that ridiculous pocket trumpet was Charlie Haden on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums. I was hooked.

This was the commingling of everything I’d heard up until this point in my short life that I’d ever considered cool. Jazz with a punk edge and an avant-garde artfulness that spoke to my rebellious teenage mind, reared on '50s B movies, Little Richard sides, Reagan-era angst, and the overriding impulse to do... something, anything that wasn’t normal. Of course, I wasn't alone. Crate digging yet again my freshman year of college, my eyes landed upon another album cover packed full of men in suits. This time, the guys were captured in the ecstatic act of performing, arms and legs akimbo, the singer crouched with full-throated vigor. It was maverick DC noise-rock outfit The Nation of Ulysses ' 1992 opus, Plays Pretty For Baby . Listening in my dorm, I came to the track, "The Sound of Jazz To Come” and the suspicion I’d been harboring since track one was confirmed. This band was tremendously influenced by avant garde jazz.

Their free jazz-esque use of dissonance and space was evidence enough; by the time they actually started playing excerpts from Coltrane ’s A Love Supreme at the beginning of a track named after an Ornette Coleman album, my mind was blown. They listened to Coleman too, and they got it. Of course, they weren't the only ones. Charlie Haden booked the Minutemen as an opening act at a show in 1984 and even sat in with the band for “Little Man With a Gun in His Hand.” After recording his 1979 album “The Bells” with Don Cherry, Lou Reed said In a 1980 interview with Creem's Dave DiMartino, "I had had this idea when I first discovered electric guitar: wouldn't it be incredible if you could play like Ornette Coleman on the guitar?" Coleman later guested on Reed's 2003 album, The Raven .

Patti Smith , who performed with Coleman when he curated London’s Meltdown Festival in 2009, was quoted in The Guardian saying, "I've been obsessed with Ornette ever since my friends and I formed a jazz club at school in the 1960s to play our records to each other...Ornette is like a genius—and a child—in the way he approaches music. Part of his appeal to people in the world of rock and punk is that he doesn't require you to be a complex musician. He just requires that you listen, communicate and play with feeling." Coleman himself was never one to revisit the past, at least creatively. He was a river of forward-motion, evolving his form with each new record. He was a saxophonist, but he also played trumpet and violin—often to his fans dismay. His roots were in bop, but he eventually incorporated classical, electrified funk, and electronic sounds into his repertoire to seamless effect. He was a musician, a conceptualist, a philosopher, and a much needed pain in the ass for stodgy jazz traditionalists. In later years, after finally earning the respect he long deserved from the jazz community, Coleman still rarely reengaged with his classic compositions.

He was eternally inspired, ceaselessly emboldened to challenge himself and the strictures of jazz establishment, new or old. That might be why, back in my dorm room in the early '90s, I found it so perplexing that nobody seemed all that interested in his music. At the beginning of NOU's "The Sound of Jazz To Come," singer Ian Svenonius delivers a bizarre, spoken word manifesto in the third person and the past tense, extolling the glory of his band as if it were an ancient religion or a branch of the armed forces. The rant is pseudo-satirical, but the words could very easily apply to Coleman: There were their strange songs, any one of which could have made a lesser band's career and each of which had the knack of standing the accepted doctrines on their head. There was their polysyllabic language and their slow acid style that corroded the sanctities. There were their concerts, with their mumbled messages which only the better souls understood.

There was the way they looked: shaggy eyebrows, ashen faces with unforgettable eyes, rough clothes that hung too loosely on their shrunken bodies, a shell of silence into which they seemed to have retreated for good and from which only the most persistent strategy could draw them. They refused to be patronized or dismissed, turned into a cult or giggled at. The important thing was to build a social analysis that would encompass modern culture and make humankind reckon with it. Ultimately, Ornette Coleman's music—spastic, soulful, atonal, gross with skronk and sharp with anger, yet lyrically breathtaking and deeply beautiful—has found its place in the halls of the jazz institution. But I don’t know if he really cared. I think Coleman’s legacy goes deeper, winding its way into the rebellious hearts of every player, from punk to blues, whose music bucks against the confines of tradition.

Ornette Coleman, Jazz Legend, 1930-2015 Published: 2015/06/11 Ornette Coleman, Jazz Legend, 1930-2015 Ornette Coleman, Pulitzer prize-winning saxophonist and leader of the free jazz movement, died this morning of cardiac arrest following an extended illness. Coleman had already attained legendary status much earlier in his life for his numerous groundbreaking works that typically challenged not only the status quo of jazz, but also the listener’s concept of what constitutes music. Beginning in 1959 with his third album as a bandleader, The Shape of Jazz to Come, Coleman began pushing and breaking the existing boundaries that defined jazz harmony and technique. A year and three albums later, he coined the term “free jazz” with his album of the same name, which featured two complete jazz quartets, recorded in stereo with each group isolated to one of the two channels, playing simultaneously for nearly 40 minutes straight.

Coleman continued to explore more avant-garde approaches to jazz throughout his career and release other landmark albums, including Song X, his 1985 collaboration with Pat Metheny, and Sound Grammar, his final album as a bandleader which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2007, the same year he was received a Grammy for lifetime achievement. Of particular note to Jambands.com readers is Coleman’s relationship with the Grateful Dead. Coleman featured Jerry Garcia on his 1988 album Virgin Beauty, and has both opened for and sat in with the Dead on a number of occasions. Ornette Coleman Dead at 85 | Billboard Ornette Coleman Dead at 85 COMMENTS AP Photo/Charles Dharapak Jazz musician Ornette Coleman is pictured before receiving his honorary doctor of music degree at the University of Michigan commencement ceremony in Ann Arbor, Saturday, May 1, 2010. Jazz legend Ornette Coleman has died at age 85 of cardiac arrest on Thursday (June 11) morning, according to The New York Times. The alto saxophonist is one of the select few individuals to change the face of jazz forever.

His fittingly titled third album The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) set the course of improvisational jazz for decades to come. Just one year later, his Free Jazz album gave a name and further direction to the burgeoning experimental jazz scene. Controversial at the time, Coleman's album -- made with fellow soon-to-be-jazz-legends Don Cherry, Freddie Hubbard and Eric Dolphy, among others -- remains challenging even to this day. Free Jazz was a landmark musically as well as conceptually. The album featured two separate quartets on each stereo channel of the LP -- which, for the listener, meant hearing two different rhythm sections playing improvisational jazz at the same time for 37 minutes. Coleman also worked with a number of rock legends over the years. He contributed to Yoko Ono's version of the 1970 LP Plastic Ono Band, and collaborated with Lou Reed on 2003's The Raven. In 2007, Coleman won the Pulitzer Prize for his album Sound Grammar, which peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart.

In late May 2015, a lawsuit was filed on Ornette Coleman's behalf by his son and legal guardian, Denardo Coleman. The lawsuit accuses Antibalas' Jordan McLean of releasing an album partially under Coleman's name without the musician's express permission. McLean denied any wrongdoing when reached for comment, but the attorney operating on Coleman's behalf told Billboard the album "was a jam session among a legend where he was permitting individuals to play with him -- not under the auspices of creating a record." Listen to the entire immortal Free Jazz album below. Privacy policy | More Newsletters AP U.S. jazz legend Ornette Coleman plays the sax during his only concert in Germany at the philharmonic concert house in Essen, Germany. Coleman, the visionary saxophonist who pioneered "free jazz" and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007, died Thursday in New York. He was 85. Jazz legend Ornette Coleman, the visionary saxophonist who pioneered "free jazz" and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007, has died. Publicist Ken Weinstein says Coleman died on Thursday at 1 a.m. in Manhattan. He was 85.

The Texas-born Coleman was only the second jazz artist to win the Pulitzer Prize in music when he was honored for his 2006 album "Sound Grammar." Christopher Lee: A Cinematic Wizard His quartet shook up the jazz establishment when it burst on the scene in 1959 with the album "The Shape of Jazz to Come," which liberated musicians to freely improvise off the melody. He became one of the world's most respected musicians, his contributions to jazz sometimes compared to those of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. Coleman is regarded as one of the greatest innovators in jazz history along with Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. In the late 1950s, he originated "free jazz," challenging the bebop establishment by abandoning the conventional song form and liberating musicians to freely improvise off of the melody rather than the underlying chord changes. Coleman broke down the barrier between leader and sidemen, giving his band members freedom to solo, interact and develop their ideas. In Memoriam: Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images Though largely self-taught, Coleman would create his own "harmolodic" concept of music, which also became a life philosophy.

The music derived from a uniquely free interaction between the musicians, without being tethered to rigid meters and conventional harmonic structure. He referred to it as "removing the caste system from sound." "I want everyone to have an equal relationship to the results," Coleman told the AP in a 2007 interview. Video Family of American Killed Battling ISIS: "He Believed in Opposing Evil" "I don't tell them what or how to play. ... Sometimes the drum is leading, sometimes the bass is leading. ... I don't think I'm the leader, I'm just paying the bills." In his later years, the jazz revolutionary became a respected elder statesman with the accompanying honors, including membership in the elite American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Grammy lifetime achievement award, even though none of his recordings ever won a Grammy. Einstein's Personal Letters to Be Auctioned But early in his career, Coleman's unconventional playing led him to be rejected by both the public and his fellow musicians who would walk off the stage when he showed up at jam sessions. One bandleader paid him not to solo; others simply fired him. Coleman was told he played out-of-tune and didn't know the basics of jazz improvisation.

One incident remained deeply ingrained in his memory: The night circa 1950 when the saxophonist was playing with an R&B band at a Louisiana road house and his solo stopped the dancers in their tracks. Coleman was dragged outside the club, roughed up and his horn was thrown over a cliff. "One guy kicked me in my stomach ... and said, 'You can't play like that!' He didn't even know what I was doing," recalled Coleman in the AP interview. "I think with dance music it's the rhythm that people like and I was just playing musical ideas. But I really did grow when I realized that all music uses the same notes whether it's classical or religious or funk. ... And when I realized that ... I decided to take my beatings until I can establish where people can say, 'Oh don't beat him, listen.'" Tired of rejection, Coleman moved to Los Angeles in 1952 where he got a job as a department store elevator operator, studying music theory on his breaks.

Coleman, who a decade before the Beatles had shoulder-length hair and a beard, soon found a like-minded group of musicians, including bassist Charlie Haden, who had performed in his family's bluegrass band back in Missouri; Don Cherry, who played a tiny pocket trumpet, and drummer Billy Higgins. "I wanted to play on the inspiration of a composition rather than on the chord structure ... and every time I tried to do this the other musicians that I was playing with would be upset with me," said Haden in an AP interview. "And the first time I played with Ornette all of a sudden the lights were turned on for me because here was someone else who was ...

doing the same thing I was trying to do." Published at 1:37 PM EDT on Jun 11, 2015 | Updated at 8:50 PM EDT on Jun 11, 2015 Jazz great Ornette Coleman dies aged 85 | Music | The Guardian Jazz great Ornette Coleman dies aged 85 The groundbreaking and sometimes controversial avant garde saxophonist, pioneer of free jazz, suffered a cardiac arrest Thursday 11 June 2015 10.03 EDT Last modified on Friday 12 June 2015 06.27 EDT Close This article is 1 year old Ornette Coleman , one of the most influential and innovative figures in jazz history, has died at the age of 85, the New York Times reports. He suffered a cardiac arrest, according to his family, and died in Manhattan, where he lived. Coleman’s greatest breakthrough came in 1959 with his album The Shape of Jazz to Come, a break from the bebop style that had been so influential in the genre, and a landmark in avant garde jazz.

His music polarised jazz fans, with reports of people walking out of shows, or arguing at his gigs with fellow audience members. Free radical Read more In 2007, Coleman told the Guardian why he had adopted his approach to the saxophone. “They were playing changes,” he said of the bebop players, “they weren’t playing movements. I was trying to play ideas, changes, movements and non-transposed notes.” Dave Holland (@TheDaveHolland) With the passing of Ornette Coleman we give thanks for the life and work of a major innovator and 100% original. He was a big inspiration. Coleman, indeed, brought a new vocabulary to jazz, in the widest terms: melody, instrumentation and technique were all taken in new directions in his music. He received the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2007 for his album Sound Grammar. Ornette Coleman: jazz revolutionary Read more Having bought his first saxophone with money he had earned from shining shoes, Coleman learned to play it as if it were a toy. “I didn’t know you had to learn to play,” he told the Guardian. “I didn’t know music was a style and that it had rules and stuff, I thought it was just sound.

I thought you had to play to play, and I still think that.” He unveiled his free jazz direction in November 1959 with a residency at the Five Spot club in New York. Critic George Hoefer wrote in Downbeat of the shows: “Some walked in and out before they could finish a drink, some sat mesmerised by the sound, others talked constantly to their neighbours at the table or argued with drink in hand at the bar.” Ornette Coleman – The Shape of Jazz to Come At this distance, it is hard to imagine the furore his music provoked, but it was revolutionary at the time. Guardian jazz critic John Fordham wrote of The Shape of Jazz to Come: “Some of it resembled bebop, but of a fragmented, idiosyncratically paced variety. Some of it was hauntingly intense.” Even for the best musicians, playing with Coleman could be a challenge. In 1986, he guitarist Pat Metheny recounted the experience of playing alongside Coleman in full improvisatory flow: ““The challenge in this situation is that sometimes Ornette plays and stops, then I have to play.

The other night in Washington, we did this tune called Broadway Blues, and he played the most perfect musical statement I’ve ever heard. I gave it my best, but I have no pretenses of improvising at that level.” He exerted influence outside the field of jazz, too. In later years, like Miles Davis, he explored electric music, working with musicians including Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. In return, he appeared on stage twice with the Dead in 1993. Lou Reed, who employed free jazz-inspired guitar playing with the Velvet Underground, professed his admiration, saying: “When I started out, I was inspired by people like Ornette Coleman. He has always been a great influence.” John Zorn recorded an album of punk-influenced versions of Coleman songs in 1989, Spy vs Spy, and when the Swedish punk band Refused set out to reconfigure their genre in 1999, they did so with an album that made explicit reference to Coleman: The Shape of Punk to Come.

His music confronted people so directly that he was once beaten up by concertgoers – but Ornette came to be one of jazz’s torch bearers Published: 11 Jun 2015 Remembering Ornette Coleman: Listen To 5 Masterpieces | Wisconsin Public Radio Remembering Ornette Coleman: Listen To 5 Masterpieces Jazz Giant Died On Thursday Thursday, June 11, 2015, 9:50am By David Hyland Share: It's a cliché that a genius' work is often only recognized after death, but this will surely be the case when history renders its final assessment of maverick jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman. His life's work was anything but a worn-out cliché. Coleman died of a heart attack on Thursday in New York. He was 85 years old. For nearly seven decades, Coleman was jazz's most stubbornly dedicated trailblazer, fringe philosopher and proponent of the music's untapped potential for invention. The scope of Coleman's work knocked down barriers -- both real and imagined -- for many of jazz's most pivotal figures in the mid-20th century and mapped out a sonic course that many of today's players still haven't stretched beyond.

Such was the impact of Coleman's work that his influence extended beyond jazz circles and he enjoyed famous fans in the pop, rock and avant-garde classical music realms. He was the fountainhead and inspiration for generations of stylistic renegades. Born in Texas in the 1930s, Coleman came of age in R&B and blues bands in the South before earning a spot as an alto saxophone sideman for many journeyman jazz performers during the height of the bebop era. By the late '50s, however, Coleman struck out on his own and sought to explore many of the ideas that he couldn't explore in more conventional gigs. Those concepts exploded on the jazz scene at a time when bebop had already solidified its hold on most jazz musicians of the era.

Coleman's two landmark albums, 1959's "The Shape Of Jazz To Come" and 1961's "Free Jazz," had the effect of an atomic blast that permanently shook bebop's hold on the music and marked the definitive end of that epoch (if not that sound.) Coleman's songs and performances were brash and revolutionary in how they turned bebop orthodoxy on its head and transformed the music into a live wire that offered excitingly new, complicated and abstract sounds and forms. As a player as well as a composer, Coleman sought not to simply deconstruct or upend many of jazz's reigning strictures, but to break through artificial walls and make undiscovered connections to other genres and compositional ideas. His vision left few things in the music as sacred, challenging traditional concepts of melody, harmony, rhythm, structure, instrumentation and musical proficiency. (Eventually, Coleman added his own screechy, sawing violin playing to his arsenal of sounds.) Like the Jackson Pollack painting that adorns "Free Jazz," these sounds could be wildly abstract. The music was aggressive, sometimes cacophonous, as sounds and melodies collided and coalesced.

Such was his headstrong reputation, however, that many of Coleman's songs were never acknowledged for their compositional consistency and the music's lyrical qualities. Meanwhile, Coleman was aided in his mission by various ensembles of sympathetic musicians. These groups yielded not only fellow revolutionists, but later acolytes like trumpeters Don Cherry and Freddie Hubbard, bassist Charlie Haden, guitarist James Blood Ulmer, drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson and bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy. These musicians, even if they adopted more mainstream stance to their own music, nevertheless evangelized many of the key points first extoled by their mentor. Although Coleman's music championed a kind of musical freedom, that liberty came with a price. Mass audiences were often cool to his experiments and his defiance offered few compromises that are commonplace with traditionalists. Coleman wanted to communicate musically with the audience, to challenge the listeners, but it was always on his terms. As a result, Coleman was the patron saint for generations of musical oddballs, sonic eccentrics and devotees of the bleeding edge. Key contemporaries like Cecil Taylor, Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra and Albert Ayler followed and expanded upon Coleman's pioneering vision.

Meanwhile, the music's towering figures -- Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and Sonny Rollins -- all subsequently embraced aspects of Coleman's ideas into their music, even if they shied away from overt praise. Beyond the insular jazz world, Coleman inspired many in the rock world as well, playing with figures ranging from Lou Reed, Captain Beefheart, the Grateful Dead and Sonic Youth, among others. Perhaps taking note of that sway, Coleman began experimenting with electric instruments in the '70s, '80s and '90s with his group, Prime Time. He even branched out to include world-music instruments and musicians into his work. Coleman continued recording and performing until very recently, but his most crucial work came in that initial burst in the late '50s and early '60s. However, his subsequent work continued in that vein and never surrendered in the face of institutional resistance or audience indifference. Cliché is never a word one would use to describe Coleman's genius.

Here are five of Coleman's most renowned compositions: "Lonely Woman" Ornette Coleman dead at 85 - Chicago Tribune Howard Reich Contact Reporter Ornette Coleman's revolutionary way of playing and writing jazz reinvented the art form Few jazz musicians have been honored and reviled, celebrated and cursed more widely or more vigorously than Ornette Coleman, who died at 1 a.m. Thursday in Manhattan at age 85. An innovator to the core, the composer and multi-instrumentalist redefined the meaning and possibilities of jazz starting in the mid-1950s and continuing through the rest of his career. Though some jazz giants, many critics and large swaths of the listening public attacked Coleman’s work and character, none could deny that he not only changed the course of the music but opened it up to possibilities previously unimagined. “It’s a great loss,” said pianist Ahmad Jamal, who once similarly faced vituperation for re-imagining the syntax of jazz.

“He had a historically wonderful career.” Said pioneering alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, “Famous people were putting (him) down very vocally.” But Coleman’s music “was new, in a large sense of that word, and very well done.” Observed Chicago saxophonist Ken Vandermark, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1999, five years after Coleman, “To put it simply, he changed the paradigm for everybody. In retrospect, it looks like a simple breakthrough to free up form and harmony the way he did, by circumventing the need for (chord) changes. ... But we’re still dealing with the repercussions of that development. We’re still talking about what jazz is and isn’t because of what he did.” In essence, Coleman dispatched with principals of harmony underlying Western music since the days of Johann Sebastian Bach. Instead of structuring a piece of music on a series of chord progressions, or “changes,” Coleman encouraged his band-mates to craft multiple melody lines at once quite outside chordal considerations.

This system of composition and improvisation, which Coleman called “harmolodics,” produced exquisite lyric phrases often steeped in the blues, but also harsh dissonances and unpredictable song forms that alienated many. “It’s like having a million melodies all at once,” Coleman told the Tribune in 2003, speaking in his Manhattan loft. “Yet it’s still a kind of unison.” Archive: Ornette Coleman still blazing a musical trail Open link By that Coleman meant that the musicians were united not by chord changes but by melodic flow, rhythmic undercurrent, blues sensibility and, of course, the spontaneity of the moment. His most famous composition, “Lonely Woman,” crystallized the lyric urgency of his work. But Coleman faced bitter rebuke for his approach. In Los Angeles, where he began developing these ideas in earnest in the 1950s, he struggled to find jazz musicians willing even to talk to him about his concepts, let alone try out the new sounds on the bandstand, he said. A few, such as trumpeter Don Cherry and bassist Charlie Haden, were curious.

“Don Cherry told me about this alto player, Ornette Coleman, so I went to hear him, and Ornette takes out this white plastic alto saxophone, and I never had heard anything so beautiful in my life,” Haden told the Tribune in 2002. “When he walked out of the club, I ran back after him. I just thought he played like some revolutionary angel. So he invited me to come to his home – actually, it was his apartment, a little one-room shack with music on the floor and everywhere. Notable deaths in 2015: Remembering legends, celebrities and other newsmakers who died this year. “And I’ll never forget what he said to me: ‘After we play the intro, listen to me, and we’ll play what we want to play, not what we’re supposed to be playing.’” The daring music that Coleman was creating with Cherry, Haden, drummer Billy Higgins and others was documented on a series of groundbreaking albums, including “Something Else!!!!

The Music of Ornette Coleman” (1958), “The Shape of Jazz to Come” (1959), “Change of the Century” (1959) and “Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation” (1960). But when Coleman brought his startling new sound to New York in 1959, many resisted. The eminent trumpeter Roy Eldridge said, “I think he’s jiving, baby.” Trumpeter Miles Davis remarked, “If you’re talking psychologically, the man is all screwed up.” And drummer Max Roach heard Coleman play and punched Ornette in the mouth, according to John Litweiler’s biography, “Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life.” Yet many listeners were intrigued, the freshness of Coleman’s sound and the freedom of his delivery representing an enormous leap forward from the bebop music of alto saxophonist Charlie Parker that had influenced Coleman so deeply. These innovations set the stage for one of the most galvanic musical developments of the 20th century: the emergence in Chicago of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which this year is celebrating its 50th anniversary around the world.

“He and (saxophonist) Albert Ayler were early cats pushing that envelope and letting us know it’s possible,” said reedist Mwata Bowden, a longtime AACM member and a former chairman of the collective. “Ayler and Ornette led to Muhal (Richard Abrams) and Roscoe Mitchell,” added Bowden, citing first-generation AACM artists. “He set up that atmosphere, the whole idea that there’s more to this music.” Coleman never stopped inventing. In 1962, he studied the musical practices of the Hopi Indians. In the early 1970s, he embraced the “healing powers” of the master musicians of Joujouka, Morocco. His “Skies of America” merged jazz and symphonic music in the early 1970s (reprised brilliantly at Lincoln Center in New York in 1997). His Prime Time band of the late ’70s dove into funk and noise. The “Freedom Symbol” suite he unveiled in 1989 featured a classically tinged 20-piece ensemble (the piece revived dramatically in New York’s Battery Park in 2000).

This enormous body of work sprang from an artist born poor in Ft. Worth, Tex., Coleman teaching himself to play saxophone and other instruments (he also played violin and trumpet effectively). Long unacquainted with the intricacies of key signatures, transpositions and other details of the composer’s art, Coleman invented his own way of building sound, as if unencumbered by certain Western musical traditions dating back centuries. Eventually, his efforts won him high honors from the music world that long had rejected him, Coleman receiving National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Fellowship in 1984, a MacArthur Fellowship in 1994 and a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his album “Sound Grammar.” Chicago heard him periodically, including a luminously beautiful set at the Chicago Jazz Festival in 2008 and a landmark, concert-length performance in Orchestra Hall in 2003. Neither the accolades nor the admonishments that came Coleman’s way seemed to alter his perspectives or his music. “Oh, man, I’ve had some really terrible things done to me,” said Coleman in the 2003 interview.

“At a certain point in my life, I just decided that I would never fight any kind of class, any kind of race, and if someone said, ‘I don’t like you,’ I wouldn’t try to defend myself. “I’m not trying to control, change, dominate, kill or be against anyone, or put somebody above another. I think my position is that I’m no more than a speck of dust in the sand, and I’m trying to avoid being stepped on.” His music conveyed precisely that equanimity of spirit, in sounds that still reverberate around the world. A selected Coleman discography: “The Music of Ornette Coleman: Something Else!!!!” (1958): Coleman’s startling debut features future collaborators Don Cherry and Billy Higgins. “The Shape of Jazz to Come” (1959): Coleman, Cherry, Higgins and bassist Charlie Haden soar. “Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation” (1960): The “Free Jazz” title is a misnomer, but the power of the double quartet is unmistakable. “Change of the Century” (1960): Coleman, Cherry, Haden and Higgins gather tremendous energy.

“New York Is Now” and “Love Call” (1968): Coleman is joined by tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman and John Coltrane alums Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. “Dancing In Your Head” (1976): Coleman embraces influences of music from Morocco. “Tone Dialing” (1995): Thick funk music swirls around Coleman’s alto, violin and trumpet. “Sound Grammar” (2006): The blues-rich live album that won Coleman a Pulitzer Prize.

Question: Free Jazz and The Shape of Jazz to Come are landmark albums by which innovative jazz saxophonist?
Answer: Ornette Coleman